


We Dream In The Dark

by knittycat99



Category: Pose (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 17:13:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18503431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knittycat99/pseuds/knittycat99
Summary: Pray Tell came to the city twenty years and two names ago.  He bears so little resemblance to that boy anymore that he almost thinks that other life – his other life – happened to someone else.  But the ghost of that boy lives in every black and brown queer boy he passes on the street, wide eyed and terrified and beaten down and scarred.  He wants to grab their hands and tell them all that they’re safe now, home now, but that’s just as false as the image they all had of the city as some twisted kind of promise.This city is nobody’s savior, and it might very well kill them all.





	We Dream In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> For everyone who knows who they are, everyone who's still figuring it out, and everyone who wakes up in the morning and and fights battles both seen and unseen.

Summer, 1967

The bus from Memphis pulled into Port Authority at 2 am, and Adam couldn’t get out of his seat. He wanted to, oh how he wanted to wash himself clean from the days of travel, and that last vicious fight with his father. But when the door swung open and the sounds of the city and the smells of garbage and something smokey that he couldn’t identify assaulted him, he was very suddenly terrified.

He clutched his satchel tight in his lap and waited while everyone around him staggered sleepily down the aisle. After the last person stepped off, the driver came back on and stopped in front of him.

“Son, you gotta get off. This here’s the last stop. Unless you wanna go back to Memphis. But holy hell, even I don’t wanna go back to Memphis.”

The Adam who had gotten on the bus in Memphis would have smiled and thanked the driver, but three days of traveling had taken that Adam and turned him into something sharper, someone tired of letting the world and everyone in it make him feel small.

“I’m never fucking going back there,” he said, getting to his feet. "And you’re not my fucking father. Don’t call me son.” He pushed past the driver, down the aisle, and off the bus. He took his suitcase from the sidewalk, rushed inside the station, and asked the attendant at the service desk for the restroom.

When he got there, he locked himself in a stall and cried.

**

All the articles he’d read had been right: New York never slept. After pulling himself together and swearing in the gray light of the men’s room that he had shed his last tears over his asshole of a father, he made his way into the bustle of the terminal. It didn’t take long to figure out where to go. Adam had always been good at being invisible; it turned out that it was just as easy in New York as it had been at home, and he was observant. 

By the time the sun came up, he was eating breakfast in an all-night diner in Greenwich Village. The food was cheap but plentiful, and the coffee was strong like his Mama made. He managed two cups, but when the waitress came to pour him a third, he covered the cup with his hand. “No thank you, Ma’am.”

“Oh, adorable and polite! Where you from, sweetheart?”

“Memphis, Ma’am. Just arrived on the bus.” Don’t talk to strangers, his mother’s voice admonished him. But his Mama wasn’t here, and how was he supposed to meet people if he never talked?

“You’re awful young to be so far from home.” A shadow crossed the waitress’ face. “So many of you,” she murmured. “So many.”

“So many who?”

“Boys. Getting younger every year. What are you, honey, sixteen?”

“Eighteen. I graduated high school last week.” 

The waitress — her nametag read Rochelle — twisted her lips into a half-smile as she swept her gaze over the other customers; it settled on a booth in the corner where a group of kids no older than him laughed and smoked. “What kind of work can you do?”

“I’ll do anything.”

“You be careful telling people that. Don’t want these streets chewin’ you up.” She lifted her chin in the direction of the booth. “You’re pretty, and eager. You don’t want to end up like them, wild and selling themselves to get by. You go down to the YMCA and get a room, and you come back tonight at 9. You can wash dishes. It’s messy, and it’s not fun, but it’s honest work.”

Adam felt a little weight form in his stomach; part of why he left Memphis (other than the fight and his father’s hate) had been the continuous judgement that permeated every aspect of life, from the time you were born until the whole church came to your funeral. Judgement and shame, that was what he left behind, and he wasn’t going to let it cling to him anymore.

“Thank you kindly, Rochelle, but I believe I’ll find work elsewhere.”

**

Three weeks after he arrived in the city, Adam was settling in. He had a room at the YMCA, the only part of Rochelle’s advice he’d taken, and found a job working as a dishwasher at another all-night diner. It wasn’t a great job, but he wasn’t going to complain; he had the night shift, 8 pm till 4 am, and the night cooks gave him free food and all the coffee he could drink. They were sweet to him even though they had no reason to be, and they taught him Spanish and how to smoke. When he was done with work, he liked to ride the subway. Twenty cents got him on the 1 train as far as he wanted to ride. Sometimes he got on at Christopher Street and went all the way north to Van Cortland Park and back, heading uptown with weary third shift workers and back downtown with fresh faced men and women in suits. Other times he went south, getting off at Battery Park and watching the summer sun rise over the Statue of Liberty and the crumbling remains of Ellis Island before walking back to the YMCA.

That’s where he was, reading a battered James Baldwin book someone had left at the diner and smoking, enjoying the silence and the scent of seaweed from low tide, when someone sat on the other end of his bench.

“Who’s your mother?” A low, melodic voice drifted over the distance between them. He couldn’t tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s, but he was intrigued.

“You don’t know her,” he said, letting his best drawl replace the clipped vowels that had started to creep into his speech. He didn’t look up from his book, but he did grind the cigarette out on the side of the bench.

“Well, we’re just a sullen little boy, aren’t we?” 

“I’m 18! And I’m not -” He broke off and looked up, fully aware that he sounded exactly as sullen as the woman thought he was. She was impeccably dressed in a yellow church suit that looked impossibly bright against her dark skin. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

“None taken. So you do have politeness in you. Do you have anyone in the city?”

Adam shook his head. “No, Ma’am.” Remembering Rochelle in the diner when he was barely born to the city, he was quick to reassure her lest she judge him. “I have a job washing dishes and a room at the Y.”

“Oh, that’s fine. But do you have a home, child?”

“I- I-” he stammered, finally settling on an easy question rather than a difficult answer. “I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Iliana Prospera, of the Royal House of Prospera. And you?”

She acted like he should know her, or know what a royal house was. “Adam. Adam Tell. It’s a pleasure. And no, I don’t have a home.”

“I thought, maybe. I’ve seen you on the subway, and sometimes walking in the neighborhood. Do you miss going to church?”

The question surprised him, as did the sudden arrival of tears in his eyes. _I am not crying in front of this beautiful woman in her beautiful suit_. “I miss the choir. And the feeling of family.”

“Well, come along, Adam Tell. First, breakfast. Second, church for the body and the mind. Third, getting you out of the Y. and last but certainly not least, church for the soul.”

“I don’t understand,” Adam said, as Iliana took his hand and tugged him up off the park bench.

“That’s okay, I’ll explain everything over breakfast.”


End file.
